A quick turnaround for the Times after the first edition last night. Chances are that the change was set up for the tweaks to the puff - a slightly more elegant typeface, smaller underline, tighter cutouts on the left and a move for the weather. But since the page was on, why not improve the splash head. The second version is better than the first, but was it the best story? Especially as one of the two polls was commissioned by the Evening Standard and so had been running for at least 12 hours before the Times put in an appearance. The policy initiative to be announced today - which made the splash in the Guardian and i - is given one paragraph halfway down.

"He will announce that all 18 to 21-year-olds would receive benefits only if they were in training or enrolled in further education. Aides said that the plan would cut £65 million from the welfare budget. The move will complement a plan to ensure that those who lose their job after years paying into the social security system receive a higher rate of jobseeker’s allowance."

The paper says that some in the party are urging Miliband to stop announcing a flurry of new policies to address the party’s difficulties, and takes the view that the polls would overshadow today's speech, which is seen as "an attempt to move on from grumblings over his performance. You might think, though, that this was a policy worth investigating. It doesn't sound exactly Red Ed-ish to make young people go back to the classroom before they can claim benefits. The OpEd writers will certainly take a view tomorrow. The Guardian also splashed on the story, but it put the same elements in a different order - with the jobseekers' allowance at the top and the polls in the middle. There was still plenty of room for the "he's too geeky" complaints.So much has been written about the electorate not being engaged in politics, but we aren't helping. As the SubScribe European elections audit found, politicians talk too little about the issues and newspapers aren't challenging them, being happy to write instead what "he" said about "her" and what "they" said about "him".Opinion polls, and even gossip about what disgruntled party members are saying, have their place - they are important weather vanes - but when they take precedence over proper matters of policy that voters need to know about and debate, there is something wrong. When I cast my vote next year I won't care what a thousand or so people told Mori or YouGov, but I will care about how we are going to get poor people with inadequate qualifications into work.

The Sun also did a quick change last night, so quick that I thought the first edition was a spoof to keep the real splash secret, but the timings don't support that theory. A football splash was essential with the England game tonight, and Suarez was the obvious target, but the bite-back joke was even worse than the Star's ants-in-my-pants. The paper put a lot of work into it though. There was the photoshopping for the front, a page 5 guide to making a set off "teeth" from an orange, and the biggest challenge: to get Sun man Tom Morgan within photographing distance of the Uruguayan star. At least the backbench had the wit to tear up the front when the Ian Wright story came in. The biting joke then became just about ok as a puff, but that 4-5 spread is just toe-curling. That's the trouble with trying to do something original and witty. You whip up enthusiasm in the office, feed off each other and become convinced that it's a great idea. And sometimes it is. That's when the Sun is at its cheeky best. But then there are the flops. Someone thought it was a great idea to distribute a special "edition" of the paper to 22 million homes. Why did anyone think that would work? The Sun is difficult to avoid and easy to get hold of. A couple of million people buy it every day, sixty odd million don't. Many, many of those have made a conscious decision that they don't want it in their homes. Why antagonise them further by forcing it on them. I was sitting in a cafe the day after the Great Distribution and heard a couple of men discussing it. "I tore it into little shreds and burnt it," one said. "It wasn't even fit to go into the recycling." Nothing like a bit of good publicity, is there. As for the Suarez edition, the response to Nick Sutton's nightly "tomorrow's papers" tweet of tomorrow' papers was instnant:

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Liz Gerard

New year, new face: it's time to come out from behind that Beryl Cook mask. I'm Liz Gerard, and after four decades dedicated to hard news, I now live by the motto "Those who can do, those who can't write blogs". These are my musings on our national newspapers. Some of them may have value.